Content Centric Crowdsourcing and Dissemination of Realtime Public Transportation Information

Road traffic congestion is a worldwide issue today. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) seek to alleviate this issue by making an informed use of transportation infrastructure. Most of existing ITS techniques are not applicable in developing regions because of chaotic traffic conditions in developing countries. Hence, it is desirable to develop ITS techniques for developing regions, enabling coordinated and informed use of transportation infrastructure. This report describes an approach which aims at providing such techniques by crowdsourcing over smartphones. Our approach aims at providing realtime information about road traffic congestion and public transportation systems. Such information can enable coordinated use of existing transportation infrastructure and thus, might help in alleviating the issue of road traffic congestion. Our approach collects information about users’ location and travel activity through the use of smartphone sensors, and a quick, easy to use interactive application. Such information, crowdsourced over a large number of smartphones, can give us realtime information about road traffic congestion and transit vehicles of public transportation systems. This realtime information can help users of private vehicles to plan their travel as per road traffic congestion, and make it easy for commuters to use public transportation systems. Communication framework of our approach is content centric as the smartphone users, publishing or seeking information, worry only about the content, and not about the origin or potential users of information. We also include a publish/subscribe mechanism in our approach, which gives flexibility to subscribe and deliver the most relevant information. Based on this design, we have developed a tum-tum tracker system for realtime tracking of IIT Bombay campus bus service.